Frustrated with the scattered, costly resources for college preparation, a 16-year-old high school student in Virginia saw an opportunity to help others like him out. College applications involve more than just writing essays; they also demand that students scour through a thousand websites in need of information, process it on their own and spend an enormous amount of time, doing everything rather than applying.
Avadhanula recalled completing roughly 50 practice questions through an online resource before encountering a prompt asking him to pay $49.99 for a subscription to see his score While preparing for his AP Computer Science Principles exam. I made, I think, 50 questions on how they phrase it, and then trained my AI agent to continue making questions like that the way I did it, and that’s where it started making them more accurate.
The information he wanted usually existed, but it was scattered across different websites, sometimes difficult to interpret and often behind paywalls, according to him. “I used to have a bunch of tabs up on my computer, where it’s like a GPA calculator, college websites, SAT resources — all of that stuff was so overwhelming,” he said. It wasn’t that information was not available about college; but Avadhanula said that it was presented in a disjointed way and still students like him were trying to use it. “That really, really annoyed me and frustrated me,” he said. Moreover, he said that experience reinforced his desire to keep Scholark free. “I remember spending countless nights, no sleep, just trying to learn how [the College Board] make their questions,” he said. The process paid off for him personally, Avadhanula said he used the early version of the platform to study for the aforementioned AP Computer Science Principles exam and earned a four out of five.
Shriyan Avadhanula was juggling his IB coursework, varsity soccer, and competitive pickleball while also being a junior at Henrico High School in Virginia. At the same time, he was navigating college websites, GPA calculators, SAT resources and test preparation platforms. What he began as a basic GPA calculator and college admissions prediction tool, eventually became Scholark, a free digital platform that now includes AP test preparation and college admissions resources. Avadhanula estimated he spent roughly two and a half to three years building and revising it, adding features as he encountered new needs as a student himself. “Why not just build a platform … I can use with everyone else?” he recalled thinking. College websites can present students with statistics, admissions requirements and other information within what Avadhanula described as a “big wall of text. With Scholark — which Avadhanula noted ends with a ‘K’ for visually aesthetic purposes- he sought to organise information around the questions and resources he and other students were looking for. Another consideration was the cost. “And I realised that wasn’t the only place that does it. “And then I learned.